"What keeps you awake at night?"

This was the question posed in a room of senior leaders in higher education across the UK in April. Quite a bit as it turns out. 

Quality student experience vs regulatory demands

The concern that is keeping me up most at night right now is the sector's ability to respond to the competing regulatory demands whilst maintaining a quality student experience. 

As Alex Usher recently commented: 

“Canada has no REF, no TEF, no KEF. We have nothing resembling the Office for Students. External quality assurance, where it exists, is so light touch as to be basically invisible. This does not stop us from having four or five universities in the Global top 100, eight in the top 200, and twenty or so in the top 500.”

And that doesn’t include the additional scrutiny put on institutions that offer vocational programmes under the control of PSRBs or the often-contradictory policies that impact university decisions such as the need for flexibility and agility versus restrictions on remote delivery. 

It’s a whole new (flexible) world

Both the demographics and expectations of our students have changed. We now have a generation of students who have no choice but to commute to university, balance higher education with full-time work and/or caring responsibilities, and have their own mental health challenges made worse by cognitive capitalism and volatile labour markets. To address this, providers have started offering blended, hybrid and even hyflex learning to accommodate the growing demands of students. 

Alongside this, we’ve spoken extensively as a sector recently about the “skills agenda” and the importance of lifelong learning which has been driven to some extent by the rise in higher apprenticeships, the creation of Skills England and the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE). All of which are, in part, a response to the needs of modern students, who require additional flexibility and agility given the other demands on their time.

Although this has certainly created new opportunities, increased flexibility and agility create increased complexity and increased costs. However, as a sector, we’ve recognised the importance of this flexible way of studying for our students and in the main adapted so that our students’ needs and wellbeing are catered for. 

It is difficult therefore to see this flexibility and agility be eroded. 

In addition, it was recently announced that funding for higher apprenticeships will be significantly reduced, despite the positive impact they have had on the professions within which they are available and the strong student outcomes for these programmes. 

New constrictions on hybrid teaching 

The recent updates to the UKVI guidance around delivery for students studying with a visa means that institutions can no longer teach students some of their content online in a hybrid fashion unless it forms less than 20% of the programme. Although that might seem like a significant amount, it undoes much of the good that the pandemic brought about in terms of our use of technology to enhance teaching. I am not at all advocating for a return to fully streamed learning, but rather the purposeful use of correctly selected technology to create a richer, more valuable and flexible learning experience. 

Certainly, the UKVI needs to know where international students are so that they can monitor net migration, but should students really form part of the government's targets? Should the UKVI be dictating how we teach home students, depriving them of the flexibility of hybrid, blended and hyflex learning, especially given the demands on students that I have discussed above? 

I recognise that what I am saying is against the backdrop of recent media coverage detailing fraud within the university franchising model and the volume of asylum claims from individuals previously in the UK on student visas. However, to the issues around franchising, this is not a new problem, and it does somewhat feel like the vilification of the HE sector in order to push through another agenda altogether. To the second issue, to what extent is this really a problem for Universities? I ask because, as was pointed out by a university quoted in a Daily Mail article subsequently referenced by Wonkhe: 

“This issue is a result of the government’s own asylum policy, which allows visa switching in a way that is outside the direct control of the universities concerned and is not a failing of the higher education sector.”

Whatever the solution when it comes to franchising and partnerships, we need to recognise that these kinds of partnerships benefit marginalised communities and go some way to addressing issues of widening participation.

An identity crisis?

So, for me the result is a bit of an identity crisis within higher education. We are being asked to be flexible and support students' learning whilst being restricted in how we offer that flexibility. We are unable to recruit international talent despite a clear need in key areas such as AI. We are asked to address the skills gap by embedding employability at the same time higher apprenticeships are being taken away from professions. We are unable to innovate because of precarious financial stability, compounded by the student fee cap and the rise in national insurance rates. 

I think there is a risk that some institutions will take students they cannot properly support, especially those that have struggled with widening participation initiatives in the past. It may be that they lack the scaffolded infrastructure to support students with more specialist needs or because they have taken on more than they can handle. This does a disservice to the students, the staff and the reputation of universities across the UK. It will fundamentally hit regulatory benchmarks and is a lose-lose situation where it is the student who ultimately pays the price. 

Back to the original question: “What keeps you awake at night?”

Specifically, it is concern for our domestic students when flexible learning models they have grown to rely on disappear, and for professional apprentices who are no longer able to afford higher education. More generally, concern that we are creating a system that is unsustainable.

That’s why it is so important to invest in innovative solutions when it comes to offering flexibility and support, whether through AI-enabled analytics or flexible study modes. Institutions will need to be bold and break from tradition in ways we never thought possible and that’s exactly what we’re doing at the University of Law. 

If you would like to get in touch with Dr Purchase to find out more or have a conversation about innovating in times of challenge, please email [email protected].